Illustrations

[From The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1948 (no copyright notice), in
Great Illustrated Classics series. "With illustrations reproducing
drawings for early editions and photographs of comtemporary scenes
together with an introductory biographical
sketch of the author and anecdotal captions by Basil
Davenport." (Online editor's note: this is the conventional
Hawthorne history, but some is more legend than fact.) See
also the illustrated volume by Davenport, The House of the Seven Gables.]

Note that the following black and white illustrations will
display in this window, but without any further TEXT DESCRIPTION.

This and the other line drawings in this volume are the work of
Felix Octavius Darley, one of the foremost American illustrators of
the nineteenth century. Darley has his own society and
now his own website
thanks to Carol Digel.

Hawthorne was employed as Surveyor of the Custom House, until
the election to the presidency of Zachary Taylor, a Whig, meant
that the Democrats like Hawthorne were thrown out of their jobs.
His wife came forward with some money that no one knew she had
saved, "amounting to--well, hundreds of dollars," says Hawthorne's
son Julian, and said, "Now you can write the Great Romance!" And
Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter.

Hawthorne lived here while writing The Scarlet
Letter. When its success had made him independent, he moved
to Lenox, Massachusetts, and lived in a little cottage called the
Red Shanty, with a forest behind it which he called Tanglewood. He
used this setting in the framework for his retelling of Greek
myths, A Wonder Book and Tanglewood
Tales. The Tappan family, to whom the land belonged, adopted
his name of Tanglewood for the whole of it. The estate was later
given to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Berkshire Music
Festival is held there every summer.

This grave in King's Chapel graveyard, Boston, is that of
Elizabeth Pain, who, in 1683, was sentenced to be whipped for the
murder of her child. The authorities have put up a sign identifying
it as that of Hester Prynne. [no longer there] The stories of the
two women are not much alike, and, except for the slight similarity
of names, there is no reason to identify them. But the mere fact
that such a grave is shown, like the spurious tomb of Romeo and
Juliet at Verona, or the spurious cell of Edmond Dantes in the
Chateau d'If, is a testimony to the vitality of Hawthorne's tale
and its hold on the imagination. [The (Omni) Parker House, formerly
Parker's Hotel, is in the background.]

A photograph of Hawthorne's wife. When he lost his job at the
Custom House, he said of her, "She will bear it like a woman--that
is, better than a man"; and she produced enough money which she had
secretly saved for Hawthorne to live on while he wrote The
Scarlet Letter, which assured his fame.

From The Scarlet Letter illustrated by Hugh
Thomson, an edition
by George H. Doran, Company,
New York, printed by Morrison and Gibb Limited, Edinburgh,
no date or copyright notice. (From the signatures the
date appears to be 1915; Thomson died in 1920.)

Information from Dr.
Chris Browne at Monash University, Australia,
2000-06-10: "Just some more info on the
illustrations by Hugh Thomson for The Scarlet Letter.
They were drawn in 1915, starting in June or July.
They were not printed and published in the UK until
1920 when the Morrison and Gibb printings were
published by Methuen. I do not know when the Doran
edition came out, but I would expect it would be 1920
or just after. The only other contemporary American
publishers of Thomson were Ginn and Co., New York (Tom
Brown's Schooldays, 1918) and the New York branch of
Macmillans (various from 1906). The best source of
information on Hugh Thomson is the book 'Hugh Thomson
his art his letters and his charm' by M H Spielmann
and Walter Jerrold, published in 1931 by A & C
Black London. This was one year after Thomson's
death."

The color illustrations are tipped in, approximately the
size of this screen rendering.
Note that the JPEG files here are at 150 dpi, they have been electronically
enhanced to add saturation to the faded colors of the print
edition, at 75% compression they lose
a little content, and the images have been artificially blurred
so as to make the dots of the printing process fuse in
the screen image.

The Rare Book Collection of Mt. Holyoke College
has an archive of Hugh Thomson's works. Some other of
his illustrations are online at other sites, from books
by Jane Austen and others. Quite a few rare book stores
online sell his beautiful volumes--they are well worth the money
in an age when it has become too expensive to produce new books
like these.
Use our /Search/ page in
another window.

Select the phrase at the beginning of each of the
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along with, at the bottom of the page, a TEXT DESCRIPTION.
The title of the window will correspond to the number of the
illustration. After the description we provide a link
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select the file size in brackets at the end of each line
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For those of you who have a need (we are not sure
that pure greed is sufficient--remember that others
are trying to use our limited bandwidth too)
to copy and
save all these illustrations to your own disks, you may
download them in one compressed file,
slht.zip [CAUTION: 1.2MB].